It was no accident that Marxism was
erected on the edifice of economic, historical and social materialism.And it was no accident that Marxism in all
its forms has bulldozed the value of individual human dignity, the last bulwark
against the dehumanization of humanity.

[][][]

The
arch-materialist position is running on empty. The persuasive force of that
view - that life, the universe and everything is all just stuff, in effect that
you, me, and all our hopes and thoughts are nothing but matter and energy - has
been groaning under the weight of the information age and the cumulative abuses
of the materialists whenever they have achieved political power.

Arch-materialism is not just a love of material things;
it is the denial of the moral reality of everything else. In its most malignant
form, materialism is a wrecking ball with the clear and present capacity to take
down modern civilization.

Values are not just inclinations; they are the living
channels of our moral awareness.The
single most harmful consequence of arch-materialism was the demotion of values
to emotional states and of morality itself to an emotional construct, a plastic
one that the authoritarians among us have molded to fit their ends.Ideologies are theologies stripped of the
universal moral underpinning.

For a thousand years, the morally aware among us have
agreed on the core values that sustain civilized life, the prohibitions against
stealing, cheating, oath-breaking, assault and murder.The implications of this consensus are
profound. When different human minds separately keep coming up with the same
insights, principles and norms, the sense of discovery is a tell.Discovery is not limited to physics and mathematics.Discovery is not invention. The core moral
principles are discovered, not just made up “by dead white men” or anyone else.

I propose that we have arrived at a new place in the
development of thought, one in which we now accept that meaning is also a discovered property of reality, detectable only
by conscious, intelligent minds (which also provides us with a pretty good
working definition of living, conscious intelligence as the set of faculties of
any living organism that detect meaning and significance).The overly skeptical, arch materialist minds
of the post enlightenment sophisticates among us are operating on borrowed
skepticism and borrowed time. Their position on center stage is over.But their naughty adult children, the ones
who still tell our real children that “if it feels good, do it” are loose and
active, much as the pathogens of a plague survive the rotting corpses that it
has already killed.

The late Douglas
Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(See footnote[1]), wrote about an
impossibly powerful computer - “Deep Thought” - that was tasked by mice to
discover the “secret of life the universe and everything”. After performing
prodigious calculations over eons, Deep Thought finally came up with an answer:
The number 42. (See footnote [2])

Adams was telling us the importance of asking the right
question.And Deep Thought’s answer was
revelatory. The computer was “at 6’s and 7’s” because the question asked it was
ultimately beyond the power of any algorithm or non-living thinking device to
answer.

We need to break into the territory where the answers our
questions about life the universe and everything are located. In other words,
we need to break out of the intellectual trap of arch-materialist thinking;
this is the conceit that absolutely everything in and out of our minds can be
fully accounted for by material processes.

We humans are stuck at the fault line caused by our own
release of acidic skepticism about two and a half centuries ago. The doubt acid
was unleashed on the world (I tend to think of Pandora’s Box or the Sorcerer’s
Apprentice) by well-meaning intellectuals bent on bringing down entire archaic
and oppressive social institutions. When the well-meaning intellectuals
unbottled the magic solvent, their main goal was to weaken the support systems
of the royalist-clerical autocracy that these intellectuals despised.

Their strategy worked…and then some. An early success
(the American Revolution) was followed by an epic cascade of unintended
consequences. Once out of the bottle, the acid of comprehensive doubt began
dissolving everything of value; the damage went well beyond the targeted
institutions.By the time the doubt
virus had infected the modern and postmodern mind, churches were on the ropes,
ethics itself was in disarray and the entire civil order was left defenseless.

Human nature so abhors a moral vacuum that something, no
matter how repugnant, will always fill it. Without the firewall of faith-anchored
morality, invented “scientific” doctrines swiftly gave rise to virulent mass
movements.Among them, Nazi race theory
and Marxist human-nature transformation theory filled the moral vacuum with
toxic ideologies.These were faux
scientific ideologies, deeply irrational to the core.Marxism and Nazism acquired the patina of
moral authority by default - the great acid flux of doubt had disabled or
crippled everything else that we believed in.

The entire skeptical project was founded in a false
premise: the notion that the material realm holds all of reality’s secrets. But
that very premise, the arch-materialist’s vision – that there exists nothing
other than the physical-mechanical – was never deeply examined nor carefully
questioned.It generated a world view
that was as fiercely held and doggedly defended as any fundamentalist religion.
For a plurality of the dominant intellectuals in the academy, it is still the
glorious paradigm of the current age…but not for much longer.

Arch-materialism makes outrageous claims on its face,
something akin to the lie that the naked emperor of the fable was clothed in
splendorous raiment.The notion that
everything that is or can be is completely reducible to mere “stuff”, to matter
and energy, and their processes and interactions, with nothing “left over”,
leads to a series of absurdities in which, for example, Mozart’s Requiem can be
fully and completely reduced to air pressure fluctuations that induce brain
electro-chemical responses in some subjects.

The claims of arch materialism are bankrupt. There is no
room in arch-materialism for the “I am” or the “I love” or for the “I ought”,
except as you or I might arbitrarily decide. In the world of arch-materialism,
our decisions themselves are a sort of ephemeral gloss on the biochemical,
bioelectrical fluctuations that we “really” are, and our very consciousness,
the sense of being, is a mirage.

This was the single greatest fraud
perpetrated on the human family of all time.

More and more of the intelligentsia are coming to their
senses; one by one, they are returning to the older, more balanced and more
integrated wisdom traditions.As these
newly awakened minds recover from the spell of arch-materialism, a realization
dawns:The mechanistic part of reality,
the subject of the physical sciences of measurement and prediction, is just
that, a part or phase of the greater scheme.Meaning cannot be redacted from the picture.Meaning is not a measurable property of
physics, chemistry or the other physical disciplines; nor is it “just made
up”.

The recovery from the grip of arch-materialism is almost
like waking up from a spell.

The Secrets of Life, the Universe and Everything can be
unpacked only when we acknowledge the deep and enduring reality of ongoing
creative emergence (See footnote [3]),
the essential ontological link between the material and the not-material phases
of reality, and the role of our own minds as the bridge state between these
two. (See footnote [4]) The gifts moral
intelligence and esthetically tuned awareness are among the cognitive tools
that were issued our species.Arch
materialism has temporarily disabled us from using these tools to discover the
nature of reality and the reality of nature.

If the esthetic is real (and it is), but cannot be
captured in the narrow confines of comprehensive materialism; then so it goes
for the ethical aspects of reality. And if the esthetic and ethical are real,
then so is the spiritual. If meaning exists at all (and it does), then meaning,
qua meaning, necessarily exists outside the confines of narrow
materialism.It follows that Reality
naturally includes both the material realm of energy, matter and space and the
non-material realm of meaning.

Reality in its totality can neither be defined by nor
limited by the material realm.The lowly
possum has a bifurcated brain, one in which the huge bandwidth connections
between left and right hemispheres (that we smart humans take for granted) are
missing.You can show something to a
possum’s left side without the right side “knowing” anything about it.

The artificial bifurcation between the material and
spiritual, between the real of the measurable physical and that of
un-measurable meaning is a mental disability.It is as if we humans had decided to emulate the lowly possum.We need to pursue a mutually correcting
dialogue between the two.For me, one
insight opened up all the rest -- that the overall integration of reality is a
primal fact, the a priori key to
further knowledge about life, the universe and everything. We thinking, feeling
beings are the interface between these two realms.We are the venue of the meta-dialogic. There
is an overall rational structure to our values that can be mapped.

For those of us who believe that acts of faith can be
both reasonable and heuristic (See footnote[5]), these
recovered insights have truly infinite implications, among them: A universe
that generates creatures that are capable of apprehending meaning and purpose;
is a universe that has meaning and purpose.

To the blind followers of arch materialism, we can do
worse than repeat the words of Hamlet - “There are more things in heaven and
earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

---

THE CRUMBLING ARCH at DAWN

PART TWO

Why pick on poor, old Marxism?

Feedback from my recent article, The Arch Crumbles at Dawn
(where I predict the demise of arch-materialism), included a complaint because
I singled out Marxism: “Please substitute the word capitalism for
Marxism. Open your eyes and look at the damage. …And, what has been
the damage of Marxism as opposed to the current state of affairs, and the vampiristic, insatiable appetites of morphing capitalism?”

My article was about values and their Source.
Every social /economic model has its best and worst exemplars.
Communism, at its best, was a drawing room theory adopted by gentle idealists
who supported the arts, the wars and wouldn't hurt a fly; at its worst,
Communism was used to create a brutal authoritarian system in which millions
were murdered and a productive country was impoverished and enslaved. At
its best, Capitalism honors the human dignity of one's trading partner and
encourages creative innovation; at its worst Capitalism has been a cover story
for organized crime, and the crony
capitalism of corrupt elites (really, organized crime by another name) who play
ball with liberal and conservative politicians alike.

How many times have you heard an intelligent person assert
that "there is no such thing as morality," or "we determine our
own morality" or "life is an accidental event" or "there is
no purpose to any of this, just human will"? These and a thousand
other similar sentiments have their roots in philosophical materialism which is
arch-materialism dressed up in skepticism. My article was a fraction
of the larger critique that includes Nazism and Islam. That larger
discussion was just touched on with this passage from my first piece –

"Human nature so abhors a moral vacuum that something, no matter
how repugnant, will always fill it. Without the firewall of faith-anchored
morality, invented “scientific” doctrines swiftly gave rise to virulent mass movements.
Among them, Nazi race theory and Marxist human-nature transformation theory
filled the moral vacuum with toxic ideologies. These were faux scientific
ideologies, deeply irrational to the core. Marxism and Nazism acquired
the patina of moral authority by default - the great acid flux of doubt had
disabled or crippled everything else that we believed in."

Marxism was the God(less) Father of all the later forms of
modern, “scientific” social reform experiments, from Nazism, Fabian Socialism to
the Third World “revolutionary” regimes of Cuba and Venezuela, all of them
authoritarian nightmares writ large and small.

Until materialism (in the technical sense I’ve been using
the term) took over the political arguments in the public square, the social
reform proposals of the day were argued in the context of well-established moral traditions.Slavery, for example, was vanquished because
of the moral confidence of the abolitionists who relied on a moral tradition,
not by throwing over traditional morality itself as was the case of Marxism.

Materialism was the ammunition of “weaponized doubt” (for more on this,
see my essay posted at http://jaygaskill.com/WeaponizedDoubt.htm ).
This was my term for the acidic skepticism that took down traditional
institutions, both bad (royalism) and good (churches), until the playing field
was open for truly revolutionary ideas, unconstrained by moral scruples.

Arch-materialism empowered “chemistry” to supersede morality
(chemistry
is a stand-in for arch-materialism). Dostoevsky said it first. In The
Brothers Karamazov, his character, Mitya
Karamazov, is in jail talking with his brother. Mitya
says that he is “…sorry for God”
because, ‘Your Reverence, you must move over a little, chemistry is coming!’”
…and he adds, "How...is man to fare
after that? Without God and a life to come? After all,
that would mean that now all things are lawful, that one may do anything that
one likes.”

In that 1880 novel, Dostoevsky nailed the central problem of
the modern and postmodern age: the notion that science has displaced God, deep
tradition and universal humanism, shunting aside our most trusted sources of
moral wisdom. In this “modern” view,
moral truth (if it exists at all) is best explained by anthropology...even
chemistry. When Dostoevsky wrote the Brothers, a malignant alternative to
traditional morality was gestating right down the street. It was God-hating,
bloodthirsty Marxism, the ideology that would destroy Russia and bring the planet
to the edge of nuclear winter. Dostoevsky
was a prophet. [6]

Arch-materialism granted
permission for “science” to do anything without reference to the overarching
moral order.Arch-materialism necessarily
supersedes morality, because without the non-material realm, morality does
not exist except in our heads.

With that background, let me return to that much maligned
system we now call capitalism, by posing a question. Which would you rather have: a
world without Marxism or a world without capitalism? The Chinese will
not abandon capitalism because they refuse to starve.They will try control it (because they fear=
it is an agent of regime change) and distort it (into a nationalized, semi-antonymous
progress-engine) as long as possible. Russia is basically in the same place.

Karl Marx is credited with naming capitalism (in Das Kapital). More than any other intellectual, Marx cleverly
moved the focus away from free individuals engaging in commercial trade to the
few, well connected players of the late 1900’s and early 20th
century who were tightly allied with powerful politicians and were not above
using political power to gain market control. Many of these “capitalists” were given
monopolies by the Crown or government.This form of “capitalism” is called mercantilism, and it has more in
common with China’s state-owned businesses than the realm of free markets and usually
bankers. Pure capitalism, in the Milton Friedman sense, requires a political
and economic system that abhors force and fraud, and effectively supports
honesty in our dealings with each other.That is why it is still comparatively rare.

Capitalism’s historical excesses are real.They are the result of human nature. We are flawed creatures with a predisposition
to blatant greed, gross dishonesty, and we are all too eager to succumb to power
lures.The communists were no different.All social systems must contend with these
human tendencies, including the systems modeled on Marxist ideology.But the authoritarian abuses of Marxism
are inherent in its very conception and structure. Marxism is a model of
economic governance that is founded on the morally unconstrained, “scientific”
remaking of human society (and even human
nature). Communism rested on the faux-scientific premise that fixing the
very structure of private ownership (eventually abolishing it) will correct all
the abuses in society.Such a conception
cannot by its very nature avoid
authoritarian abuses so severe that they that should chill the hearts of liberals
and conservatives alike.

German National Socialism arose as the dark mirror image of
its enemy, Russian Communism. Nazism was founded on an equally loony faux-science,
the pernicious notion of a state-run eugenics program aimed at racial superiority
- this in contrast with Marx’s scientifiic social engineering aimed at enforced equality.
The socialist project in all its forms (whether Fascist, communist or
communist-Lite) is the bastard child of Marxist materialism.

Our culture, indeed the whole modern Western
social order, are deeply infected with arch-materialism and its spawn.Mr. Romney’s 47% gaffe was an echo of Marx’s
economic determinist materialism.And
the campaign’s laser-like focus on economic, i.e., narrowly material issues
instead of values, was a concession to Karl Marx’s materialism.

Look around you. We are expected by our dominant handlers to
seek material things and the attendant status they seem to confer above all
other considerations.Values?
Especially moral values rooted in religious and other traditions? Not so much.

The 2008-9 American mortgage debt collapse was sold by our
elite opinion makers as mostly a financial malfunction, brought about by
well-meaning people caught up in an imprudent bidding bubble. As if getting something for nothing and
getting rich quick without productive effort, as if tricking your fellow
investors and nationalizing a Ponzi scheme were not symptoms of a profound
moral failure!

The mortgage/banking crisis of 2008-9 was a truly massive
moral failure with catastrophic financial consequences for the innocent and
guilty alike.Our elite-run financial
system was embarrassed and almost brought down by endemic dishonesty,
self-deception and endemic breaches of trust. Many of the same elites have proposed
fixing this mess by deflating the value of our obligations (which amounts to theft
by stealth in my moral universe), and by treating miscreants and victims alike
(the very definition of injustice).

If we fully implement their proposals, another damaging moral
failure is certain to follow. The
collapse of materialism and the resurgence of moral values are just in the
early stages.That is why I described this
as dawn. When it takes place, our recovery will not be more than another
bubble, unless it has a necessary moral component.When dawn comes, it’s time to get up. We have
a lot of work to do.

JBG

Jay B Gaskill

Attorney at Law

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[1]
Adams whimsically described the series as a “trilogy in five parts.”

[2]Deep Thoughtwas a computer that was created by the
pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings that appear in our universe as
mice. As to the answer 42, Adams (through a character) said, “I
think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually
known what the question was.”

[3]
Stay in touch with this concept.Emergence
represents the seemingly spontaneous appearance of order in otherwise less
ordered systems.Think of bird flocking
behavior and the seeming self-assembly of the constituent molecules essential
for living organisms. The phenomenon is well studied, but less comprehensively
applied than it can be.For example, conscious awareness can be understood as
an emergent state of higher order in
a neural system.Creative leaps, whether
in evolution or thought are examples of emergence.Of course, much more remains to be said on
the topic.

[4] In
effect, the entire non-physical realm (thinking of the realm Plato’s forms as a
stripped-down precursor) and the realm of physical processes can be understood
as phases of the same encompassing reality (i.e., the share the same
ontological status, much as matter and energy of solid and gas represent phase
states of the same “stuff”.This is very
condensed version of a longer discussion by the author.

[5]Heuristic
systems are capable of learning from experience.Similarly, the necessary faith-exercisesthat enable us to rationally deal with the
unseen, including the inferential and the partially known, allow us to detect
important aspects of reality that arch-materialism conditions us to ignore. For
example human trust always requires an exercise of faith. In this sense,
arch-materialism is anti-heuristic; it even rejects the faith of scientists
that the universe will be intelligible to human reason. The
scientist/theologian John Polkinghorne(below) is excellent on this question.

[6]…And so was the
poet Matthew Arnold, when he wrote,
“The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore/ Lay like
the folds of a bright girdle furled/ But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long,
withdrawing roar,/Retreating, to the breath/Of the
night-wind, down the vast edges drear/And naked shingles of the world.” From Dover Beach (1867).
…And so was William butler Yeats: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The
falcon cannot hear the falconer/ Things fall apart. thecentre cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence
is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of
passionate intensity.” The Second Coming
(1919-20)